THERE IS DEATH IN THE POT - The University of Texas at Arlington

debate about the nature of commerce and consumption, gender and sentiment as well the
slave trade. The tea table embodied the tensions of a rapidly expanding consumer
society. When abstention writers introduced the violence of the slave trade into the cozy
tea scene, they reminded readers that the apparent domestic harmony of the tea table was
created by a violent form of consumption, one often driven by female desire for fashion.
Yet abstainers believed women could serve as both the nation’s moral guardian and its
commercial control. The tea table, they hoped, could serve as the transformation of
female sensibility from self-indulgent to self-sacrificing; in turn women would influence
a new form of commerce, defined as much by its moral and cultural qualities as its
financial exchange. 10 Thus, Bayard described the American tea table at a critical moment
of redefinition.
The first abstention campaign illuminates the dynamic relationship between
slavery and the ideologies of commerce and gender. Shifting ideas about the nature of
commerce as well as new opportunities to consume — regardless of race, class, or gender
— provided unprecedented opportunities for expression of individual values, particularly
10 See Brycchan Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment
and Slavery, 1760-1807 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 7-8; G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of
Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago and London: The University of
Chicago Press, 1992), 37. Carey suggests that in this period the discourse of sensibility served “as a site for
the working out of changing gender relationships.” Similarly, Barker-Benfield argues that sensibility
attempted to reform female and male manners. In her analysis of women’s involvement in the first
abolition campaign, Kate Davies argues that female behavior represented “authoritative moral constancy.”
Thus, abolitionists positioned feminine sympathy apart from the marketplace and defined abolition as a
moral question. While I agree with Davies’s assessment of female behavior, I disagree that such behavior
was “apolitical.” See Kate Davies, “A Moral Purchase: Femininity, Commerce and Abolition,” in Women
and the Public Sphere: Writing and Representation, 1700-1830, ed. Elizabeth Eger, Charlotte Grant, Cliona
O’Gallchoir, and Penny Warburton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 133-159.
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